Design-build construction firm Ramtech Building Systems of Mansfield, Texas has added the Redwater, Texas Independent School District’s new 18,348-square-foot middle school facility to its featured list of permanent modular school building projects. The $2.7 million development required demolishing the School District’s existing seven classroom middle school facility and replacing it with a new state of the art facility that can accommodate 350-400 students.

The new building was constructed using Ramtech’s Accelerated Building System, a permanent modular construction process which incorporates a prefabricated modular building with a conventional five inch poured-in-place concrete slab that serves as the building’s structural floor. The structure was designed to incorporate 13 standard classrooms, three large instructional spaces with dedicated storage areas, a teachers work/break room, two student restroom groupings, faculty toilets, and a central corridor with 300 lockers.

The modular school building incorporates a full masonry exterior with rigid panel steel roofing and extensive window glazing. The project also required full site development including the extension and connection of utilities, rerouting of an existing bus lane, building up the surrounding site elevation, and providing for additional sidewalks, canopies, and fencing.

Located in Bowie County twelve miles southwest of Texarkana in the Northeast corner of the state, Redwater ISD currently serves 1,146 students from the surrounding area. When the district chose to replace their aging middle school, they turned to Ramtech and the company's Accelerated Building System approach to meet both their budget and timeframe considerations.

According to Gary White, Ramtech's Vice-President of Sales, “Once Redwater decided to proceed with developing a new middle school by working from their available funds, they recognized that our Accelerated Building System approach was the fastest most economical way to do it.”

The ABS method is a permanent modular construction approach that combines the best of off-site prefabrication and on-site construction techniques in order to produce a building faster and with less cost but identical in the look, functionality and life expectancy of a completely site-built structure.

Ramtech accomplishes this by setting factory assembled modular sections complete with attached ceilings and walls—but no floors—directly onto a conventional concrete slab foundation. This allows the concrete slab to become the floor of the structure just like a site-built building. They then site-apply all of the exterior and interior finishes, enabling them to provide their clients with a new facility faster and with less design and construction costs.